We got away from Stanford early afternoon and stopped at an In/Out Burger place to try it out. It was packed at 2 in the afternoon. We haven’t seen many McDonalds out here and it might be because In/Out is serious competition. We thought is was pretty good – certainly a cut above McDonalds and at a similar price.

I always thought Poplar ended at the Mississippi River. Now we know it runs all the way to the Pacific Ocean!

From there we made our way down to Monterey about an hour and a half drive. It wasn’t long into the trip I began to have regrets. We were taking the road that eventually runs to Los Angeles. We ran into 3 major traffic jams along the way and lost a good hour or more. We were already pushing it to get there is time to adequately tour the Monterey Bay Aquarium.

We got to the aquarium 2 hours before closing and paid $78 admission – WOW! It turns out it was actually worth it. It is a world class facility right on the ocean. It has many really neat animals and exhibits you just wouldn’t see anywhere else. Everything was really first class.

Two exhibits that stood out consisted of shorebirds and jellyfish. The shorebirds were in this open beach area that was waist high. There were no cages – it was all open. They would come right up to you walking or swimming but made no attempt to leave the area. Right behind them was this big picture window overlooking the Pacific.

The jellyfish exhibit was even more impressive in a darkened room with these huge backlit tanks full of multicolored jellies large and small. The tanks were so beautifully lit and immaculately clean that at first you really had to look close to tell if they were real jellies or if you were looking at a super high definition tv screen.

That night’s dinner was at a spectacular spot on the wharf overlooking Monterey Bay.

Happily the trip back to Cupertino was a lot easier than the one going down!